In a world filled with millions of instances of
hyper-stimulating digital content - thinking, learning and the development of
intellectual assets suffer. In a recent article I authored titled, It’sTime to Make Technology Disappear,
I shared that technology has increasingly become a hindrance to my thinking, a
distraction to thoughtful, productive work. I love technology, but it has
reached the point where it has overwhelmed my senses, and I doubt I am the only
one.
Thoughtful thinking, and by that I mean thinking that
utilizes analysis, comparisons, judgment, creativity, planning, forecasting and
imagining requires dedicated time to ponder, formulate and connect ideas and
thoughts. These activities require a mental focus void of interruptions.
I had the opportunity to manage teams of programmers for
many years. You quickly learn that quality programming requires dedicated
time absent from distraction. I read once that programmers, if
interrupted, take 20 minutes to fully return to the level of mental
concentration they had before interruption. This is one of many reasons I
turn off nearly all sound and visual alerts on my laptop and mobile
devices. It is hard enough focusing my own brain for long periods of
time, let alone being bombarded by digital distractions.
In our personal multi-screen lives filled with alerts,
notifications, reminders, news flashes, advertisements and 24x7 communications
via smartphones and social media, it is easy to lose the storyline we each want
for our own lives. Our personal storyline is our past, present and
future. It is the story we want our lives to tell. Recognizing our past
storyline, determining how we want to change, and then ensuring we are taking
the necessary steps to live it, takes focused thinking and time – all things we
quickly lose under the onslaught of digital glimpses and instances.
In our professional lives we often have specific and routine
deliverables, plus the increasing request to help our employers innovate,
create, invent and digitally transform. Our routine deliverables and
tasks often benefit greatly from technology that improves productivity (and by
the way can often be done by robots), but unless we can “make technology
disappear” into the background, it inhibits our human ability to think
thoughtfully about important future business and digital transformation issues.
If we are to claim and protect our humanity amongst all of the digital
distractions, we are going to need to figure out a way to control both our
technologies and ourselves.
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Kevin Benedict
Writer, Speaker, Analyst and World Traveler
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***Full Disclosure: These are my personal opinions. No company is silly enough to claim them. I am a mobility and digital transformation analyst, consultant and writer. I work with and have worked with many of the companies mentioned in my articles.
